Publisher Description

Examining the historical and social trajectories involved in the continuous development of civil society, this volume reveals the contextual nature of the process. Through empirical studies focusing primarily on Denmark and covering the period from 1849 to the present day, it analyses the manner in which civil society has been practised and transformed over time. Presenting a new theoretical framework informed by a relational and processual perspective, the book sheds new light on familiar questions pertaining to civil society, the production of its boundaries and spaces of action, and the means by which these spaces can become causal factors. A fresh intervention in the study of a concept that has been central in defining ideas of solidarity and the common good, and to which researchers and politicians look for solutions to the great challenges of our time, Civil Society: Between Concepts and Empirical Grounds will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics, history and philosophy with interests in civil society.

Author Biography

Liv Egholm is Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.Lars Bo Kaspersen is Professor in the Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is the co-editor of Does War Make States? Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology and the author of Anthony Giddens: An Introduction to a Social Theorist.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Setting the Scene; 1. A Processual-relational Approach to Civil Society; 2. The Modern Conceptual History of Civil Society; 3. The "Long History" of Civil Society in Denmark and Western Europe: Civil Society – In the Shadow of the State (Eighteenth to the Twenty-first Century); 4. Different States, Different Shadows: The Particular Exceptionalism of Civil Society in the United States; Part 2: The Emergence of the Danish Civil Society; 5. Civil Society and the Civilizing Mission; 6. Christianity, State, and Voluntarism: Protestant Processes of Privatization and Deprivatization; 7. Philanthropy as the Co-creator of the Welfare State; 8. Past and Present Futures of Democracy: The Danish Peasants' Movement as Democracy Instigator and Cultural Mythologizer; 9. Eclipsed by the Welfare State: Understanding the Rise and Decline of the Danish Workers' Cooperation, 1871–2000; 10. Civil Society in the Shadow of the Danish Welfare State; 11. Civic Action as Temporal Process-in-Relations: Towards an Events-Based Approach; Part 3: Epilogue; 12. Civil Society as Process and Valuation

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